The Edgemere County Commission adopted its post-census redistricting plan on a Tuesday in late May.
Solomon Wexford-Halloway did not attend the Tuesday meeting of the Edgemere County Commission at which the new redistricting plan was adopted. He learned of the vote by reading about it in the county paper on Wednesday morning, and he learned the substance of the plan the way a civil-rights lawyer learns the substance of anything, which was by sitting down with the map.
Magnolia, the family black Labrador, sat at his feet under the kitchen table while he spread the printouts and saw what the new commission map did to the neighborhood the city called Edgemere Heights. The plan fractured the historic Black community across four commission districts. It paired each fragment with a much larger majority-white population. It would, on the next election, end fifty-six continuous years of Edgemere Heights representation on the county commission. The line work was clean. The numbers had been assembled professionally. The wrong, on the careful record, was real and was documented.
Solomon is fifty-six. He has spent twelve years as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and nineteen years as a partner at the small civil-rights firm of Wexford and Brentwood. His wife Adamma, a public defender, has been the household even keel for twenty-eight years. The Edgemere County branch of the NAACP, led by the longtime community leader Charity Forster-Halsey, retains the firm. Solomon and his partner Adella Brentwood-Marsh file the federal case under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Genre: Mystery
Solomon Wexford-Halloway did not attend the Tuesday meeting of the Edgemere County Commission at which the new redistricting plan was adopted. He learned of the vote by reading about it in the county paper on Wednesday morning, and he learned the substance of the plan the way a civil-rights lawyer learns the substance of anything, which was by sitting down with the map.
Magnolia, the family black Labrador, sat at his feet under the kitchen table while he spread the printouts and saw what the new commission map did to the neighborhood the city called Edgemere Heights. The plan fractured the historic Black community across four commission districts. It paired each fragment with a much larger majority-white population. It would, on the next election, end fifty-six continuous years of Edgemere Heights representation on the county commission. The line work was clean. The numbers had been assembled professionally. The wrong, on the careful record, was real and was documented.
Solomon is fifty-six. He has spent twelve years as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and nineteen years as a partner at the small civil-rights firm of Wexford and Brentwood. His wife Adamma, a public defender, has been the household even keel for twenty-eight years. The Edgemere County branch of the NAACP, led by the longtime community leader Charity Forster-Halsey, retains the firm. Solomon and his partner Adella Brentwood-Marsh file the federal case under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Hadley Thorne's The Districting